The invention relates to a catheter for the injection of medicine or other fluid into the walls of a hollow organ or another body cavity.
For the medical treatment of patients it is advantageous to utilize treatment methods by which the medicine can be directly applied to the particular infected or ill body part. for treatment, for example, within hollow organs, body cavities, or blood vessels, particularly arteries, various catheters have been proposed by which medicines can be supplied to the area adjacent the tissue to be treated. The most simple catheters of this type are infusion catheters which have one or more openings adjacent the front end of the catheter or which are even perforated. They are expanded so as to come into firm contact with the vessel walls and to supply thereby the medicine directly to the tissue to be treated. In this way an angioplastic balloon (porous balloon) can be provided which has a number of small holes and is expanded upon admission of the medicine under pressure and which thereby is placed into firm contact with the wall of the artery in which it is disposed so that medicine can be supplied to the adjacent tissue under pressure.
It is however a disadvantage of such systems that the medicine is effective only for short periods and the amount of medicine applied is uncertain. If simple infusion catheters are used the medicine may also be carried away very rapidly. It may therefore be necessary to extend the infusion treatment over several days to achieve a hypothetical medicine concentration at the location to be treated. This requires a relatively long hospital stay and also increases the risk of infections or other complications. It is also a disadvantage that the treatment cannot be performed concurrently with a dilatation procedure in a single operation.
It is the object of the present invention to provide a catheter by which, without encountering the above-described disadvantages, medicine can be administered internally in a simple and safe manner particularly directly to the walls of body cavities, hollow organs or vessels where the medicine is needed.